Conventional film, and more recently, digital cameras are widely commercially available. Cameras range both in price and in operation from sophisticated single lens reflex (SLR) cameras used by professional photographers to inexpensive “point-and-shoot” cameras that nearly anyone can use with relative ease. However, all of these cameras operate with little, if any, information about the Z-axis (i.e., the distance from the camera to objects regions of the scene being photographed).
Some digital cameras repeatedly take images of relatively small, predefined regions of the overall scene being photographed to estimate a distance to a particular object in the predefined region for focusing the lens to that object. However, no distance information is obtained for other regions of the scene being photographed. Typically a focus number (e.g., 1 bit) representing the final lens position is stored with a low resolution focus image that can only be used for focusing the camera. In addition, any information which was gathered is used to focus the camera and is then discarded.